How Do I Get My Husband to Do Housework?!?! (Part 3: Giving Back Responsibility)

While being unable to change your husband through your attitude or great communication skills may sound bleak, this doesn’t mean you’re doomed to handle everything by yourself. You still have power and control over your own actions. You can control what you will do and what you will not do. You can decide what you will tolerate and what you won’t tolerate. That is, you can give your husband’s responsibilities back to him, and you can reset your boundaries so that your husband’s irresponsibility hurts you as little as possible.

We can give our husbands back full responsibility for their actions: the mental burden of remembering and thinking about those tasks, the emotional response when it isn’t completed, and the hassle and consequences of dealing with undone tasks.

A great place to start is the responsibility of picking up after oneself. Even the smallest of children are responsible for cleaning up after themselves. It’s absolutely unacceptable for any individual, especially an adult, to delegate this most basic responsibility to someone else. A grown man is responsible for throwing his trash in the garbage, putting his laundry in the laundry basket, cleaning up the messes he makes, placing his dishes in the dishwasher, and putting away the things he takes out.

If you’re doing any of those things, stop picking up after your husband. Release the full mental, emotional, and physical responsibility of picking up to him. Don’t give a flying flip to his mess. Turn a blind eye. It’s his responsibility. Let him be bothered by it if and when he’s bothered by it.

And that’s key: you’re releasing the responsibility to him not as a manipulative move to get him to change but as a gift to yourself. The difference between releasing full responsibility and trying to manipulate him into changing is noted in your emotional response. If you’ve truly released responsibility over his actions, you’ll see the clothes he threw next to the laundry basket, shrug, and step over them. If you’re trying to manipulate him into changing, you’ll see those clothes, get agitated, and scream a long list of grievances at him when he comes home that night.

It’s not that it’s wrong to feel frustrated, embarrassed, maybe even a bit disdainful when you see your husband’s chronic irresponsibility. Feelings are feelings. But it’s a fine line between feeling and expressing legitimate feelings because that’s your emotional response, and feeling and expressing legitimate feelings because you still feel responsible for getting your husband to change.

For some women, it’s difficult to step over piles of laundry or see stacks of unwashed dishes. Those messes affect their emotional balance, or make taking care of their own tasks difficult. In these cases, not picking up after their husbands still leaves wives inconvenienced and suffering the consequences of their husbands’ irresponsibility.

Here’s where you get creative and come up with ways to disentangle yourself from the consequences and inconveniences of your husband’s bad choices. If he leaves trash, dirty dishes, or belongings strewn out in shared spaces and isn’t bothered by them, put them in a place where they will not bother you but will only bother him — his desk, his side of the bed, his lounge chair. If it’s really bad, you might move your belongings to the guest room so that you each have a space of your own to keep or not keep at your choosing without inconveniencing the other person.

This concept of disentangling yourself from your husband’s rightful consequences applies to things other than picking up after oneself. If you’re sick of scheduling your husband’s appointments, reminding him about them, and rescheduling them when he misses them, stop. If he doesn’t care enough about his health, his teeth, or his haircut, that’s sad and unfortunate, but it’s not your job to care for him. If he misses an important meeting because he failed to write it down, keep a planner, or check the planner regularly, that’s frustrating, but it’s his responsibility to face the consequences — whether it’s rescheduling, angering a friend, or missing out on an opportunity.

Does this sound cruel? It can look like cruelty if we’re used to believing the lie that a good wife will bend over backwards to take care of her husband. Our culture promotes the idea that men are helpless; that marriage is designed to make them better; and that good wives exist to do all the things those silly, dear men just plumb forget about.

This is ridiculous. Grown men are capable of doing everything their wives do for them. They may choose not to do everything their wives do for them, but that should be on them.

And on the receiving end, yeah, it certainly doesn’t feel great. But as a Formerly Horrible Homemaker, I can assure you that I only changed into a Fairly Decent Homemaker because my husband stopped picking up after me, and I was the only one living with the consequences of my mess.

Words, emotions, even guilt — none of those things changed my mind the way dealing with the consequences of my undisciplined life did.

Just as I took twenty-four years to feel the effects of my lack of discipline, our husbands have their own journey in becoming aware of their problem, feeling motivated to change, discovering the root of their issues, and finding the tools needed for their transformation. You can’t do any of that for him, and you’re not supposed to.

We have to let our husbands make mistakes and feel the consequences of their irresponsibility. We have to let them make the journey toward responsibility in their own way and their own time. We can offer insight and support, but trying to change them will only cause us frustration and stall our husbands’ journeys. We also must relinquish the guarantee that our husbands will make the changes needed to be equal partners in household matters. Maybe they will never change. That’s heartbreaking, but it’s 100% their responsibility — which means you don’t have to feel responsible for it.

Obviously, the nature of marriage and living together means that wives will still be affected. Some irresponsibilities are so severe that a wife cannot disentangle herself from the consequences of her husband’s choices without separation. But I’m finding that in my particular circumstances, with a husband who cares about equality and my happiness, just freeing myself from the lies that drive me nuts, figuring out the real reasons why he doesn’t follow through, and giving back his responsibilities to him alone makes a huge difference in our marriage — and the household.

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Ezer is a lifestyle blog for egalitarian Christian women. Our readers are intelligent and compassionate, interested in the lives of others and engaged with the ecumenical Christian tradition. read more